The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man

By Dan Huddleston

For most of my life, I have been infected by wanderlust. When I see an airplane flying overhead or a ship on the horizon, I can’t help but ask myself, “I wonder where they are going?” 

Life, as it has evolved, has led me on a journey that is beyond my imagination. I participated in one of the most polarizing events in U.S. history, the Vietnam war. I also was a participant in, quite possibly, the most important event in U.S. labor history, the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike.

The second of those events led me to an amazing adventure. I lived outside of the United States for nine years. I have crossed the Pacific Ocean 11 times. I have crossed the Indian Ocean seven times. I have crossed the Atlantic Ocean more times than I can count. I have been on six of the seven continents and visited more than 90 countries. Along the way, a brilliant and beautiful young woman decided to become my partner and accompany me on that journey. 

This is the story of that adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398415225

Dan Huddleston

Dan Huddleston began as a boy with no confidence and no prospects, who grew up to play the ultimate confidence game, Chicago Air Traffic Control. Then came an adventure where he spanned the globe with a brilliant and beautiful woman at his side.

Book preview

About the Author

Dan Huddleston began as a boy with no confidence and no prospects, who grew up to play the ultimate confidence game, Chicago Air Traffic Control. Then came an adventure where he spanned the globe with a brilliant and beautiful woman at his side.

Dedication

I dedicate this to my incredible lady. Every day, you made me better than I am. I miss you every minute.

Copyright Information ©

Dan Huddleston 2022

The right of Dan Huddleston to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398415218 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398415225 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge all of my friends and family whose encouragement made this happen.

A special nod goes to Ron McCulloch (Dr Mac). Without you, this would not have become a reality.

In the Beginning

I will tell you a story. It is not a sad story, although at times it may seem so. It is a story of overcoming. A story of succeeding. A story of achieving the American dream.

My dad and mom were married in October 1942. He was 20, she was 16. Two weeks later, he left for the army. Many people wondered why he had married. After all, it was well known that he liked the girls and they were surprised he was willing to choose just one and settle down. At the end of 1945, he returned from the war and began the process of settling back into a routine and starting a family. He farmed 90 acres of bottom land along the Current River in southern Missouri. He tried to raise cotton but it was a time of drought and the crops were not willing to cooperate. He had better luck with starting the family and soon after he returned, Mom became pregnant. My brother, Ron, was born on 1 January 1947. They didn’t wait long and Dave was born 17 December, also in 1947. They waited a while after that, although it’s anybody’s guess why, and I came along in May of 1951.

My dad had a lifelong problem of not being able to stay away from the girls and it finally caught up with him. He and my mom divorced when I was 18 months old. Soon after the divorce, Mom packed us up and moved to Flint, Michigan, following two of her sisters and a brother who had gone there to work in the Buick plant.

During this time, my dad happened upon a man whose car had broken down. Pop was a self-taught mechanic. The farm was not producing much money so the only way to get farm equipment repaired was to do it himself. He had a golden touch with anything needing to be done by hand. So, he stopped that day and fixed the man’s car. The thankful man told him, I own a service station in a small town in Michigan and if you ever need a job, come see me.

When Mom left for Flint, taking us with her, Pop decided it was a good time to sell the farm and follow her so that he could be close to us. He had remarried shortly after he and Mom split up so he, along with his new wife and her two sons, got in the car and headed out. He went and found that man that he had happened upon, in the small town in Michigan, and went to work in his service station. He eventually bought the station from that same man and ran it for a while before selling it and moving along to other things. He stayed in that small town until 1976.

It was the early 50s and Mom was a young woman with three small children and no education. She was very susceptible to a dandy coming along with slicked back hair and shiny shoes saying nice things to her. She fell into the trap set by a snake in the grass and soon found herself married again. Not long after, another baby came along. A little girl this time.

I think it’s safe to say that my dad and Mom’s new husband despised each other from the first meeting. They came very close to a fight at one of those early meetings and the man pulled a knife. My dad backed away. Who knows where it might have ended up but one night, the man put Mom, us three boys and the baby on a bus and sent us away. Our destination was Sarasota, Florida, where we moved into a small house with his mother. He followed soon after.

It was only after he arrived in Florida that he began to reveal his true character. That character was of an alcoholic with a mean streak, needing someone to vent his venom on. There were four easy targets: three little boys and my mom.

My dad, at this time, was sitting in Michigan and had no idea where we were. He went to Flint to see us and no one could tell him anything other than we had disappeared. Mom was not allowed to tell her family where we had gone. One day, a 7-year-old boy, Ron, tore a piece of cardboard off a box; on one side, he wrote, ‘Daddy, we are in Sarasota, Florida’; on the other, Ray Huddleston, Eau Claire, Michigan, and dropped it in a mail box with no postage. Somehow, it made its way to my dad. I still have that piece of cardboard today.

Remarkably, my dad found us and they worked out that we would spend the school year in Florida with my mom and the summer break in Michigan with my dad. That only lasted a short time.

The abuse began not long after we arrived in Florida. I can tell you that Ron got the worst of it. He was older and a feisty little shit who was always willing to fight back. Dave, next in line, was getting his share also. I was youngest but not left out either. I will not go into the specific details, just suffice it to say none of it was pretty. Every evening when he came in from work, he would be drunk and we were going to pay the price. I found a safe haven; I would hide deep in a closet. Usually, he would give up before he found me, but not always.

There’s every reason to believe that had it continued, someone would have ended up dead. It probably would have been one of us, as we were just little boys. Fortunately, the school stepped in and brought things under control.

My first year in school was first grade. There was no kindergarten at that time. We attended Bayhaven Elementary school. I was 5 years old and turned 6 just before finishing that year. On the last day of school, my dad showed up to collect us for the summer. The school would not release us until my dad sat down with them. They told him that if he brought us back for the beginning of the next school year, they would take steps to have us placed in foster homes. The school saw the damage being done and was concerned for our safety.

So, at the beginning of the next school year, we were enrolled in school in Michigan. Pop just never took us back! One day, in the fall, Mom showed up trying to get us back, but my dad would not let us go. By then, she’d had another baby with this guy and a third was on the way. A petition was made to the court in Butler County, Missouri, the court that had issued the original divorce decree, and a date was set to reopen the custody issue. The court date was for late January. Mom didn’t show up. It was some time before we learned that the reason she had not shown up was that she had just given birth to the new baby and was not able to travel. On the basis of her not showing up, the court granted full custody to my dad. The next time I saw my mom was when I was in 8th grade. The next time after that was at Christmas time, my senior year in high school.

We were all damaged in some way from the experience. I won’t speak of the effect on Ron and Dave; only that they chased their own demons for the rest of their lives. As for me, I was broken. I was afraid of the world. I found my escape still hiding in the closet. Most days when the others were out playing, I would be in the closet with a flashlight and a book. My books were my escape. My books took me to all kinds of places. I could be anything I wanted to be, and I developed this wonderful fantasy. In my fantasy, I travelled the world! I had an important job and made lots of money! I married a brilliant and beautiful woman who walked by my side through all of my adventures!

In reality, through high school, I was afraid of everything that moved. I mostly lived inside of my own head and was determined to never let anyone know when something hurt me. I had zero self-confidence. I had no prospects. I was convinced I was dumber than a brick, but I had my fantasy.

When my dad had finished 8th grade, his father had told him that he had had all the education he needed and it was time for him to go to work and help support the family. He did so without thinking twice about it. At that time, in that part of the country, it was what you did. Because of that, he had no concept of the value of an education. Since he didn’t understand the value, it was not possible for him to teach me the value. Along with my dad, there were two older step-brothers and two older brothers and I do not believe any of them graduated from high school. I believe some of them went back later and finished, but that was the example I had. I meandered my way through school, doing enough to get by, thinking that it was all I was capable of. I assumed that when I got out of high school, I would end up in some dead-end job and live my life that way, but I still had my fantasy.

In little Podunk, Michigan, there were a few true American heroes. They were men and women who were willing to help a kid who was a lost cause find himself. They refused to give up on me, even though I had given up on myself. They made the extra effort to convince me that there was more here than I could possibly have ever believed.

I thought it would be really cool to be an air traffic controller. I read about it in a book. I never really believed it was something I ‘could’ do, but I thought it would be a really cool job to have. I spent as much time with Sam Conto as I could. Sam taught social studies and was my guidance counsellor. I always knew that most people thought he was a real hard case, but I got a different look at him.

Over time, I came to understand that beneath that hard exterior was a real soft spot for kids, especially the lost causes. I talked to Sam because he made an effort to make me feel good about myself. He pushed me to believe. He told me often, ‘you can do anything if you want to enough’. One day I told him about this really cool job I had read about. Of course, I could never actually do something like that.

He said, Why not?

I said, Well, to begin with, you have to be really smart to do that.

He said, OK, why not you? I had no answer. The next time he and I got together, he said he had done some research and found out how it was possible to become an air traffic controller.

He said there were a couple of different ways to go about it, but the one that most people used was through the military, and if you’re going to go the military route, the Air Force was the way to go. Since their primary focus is with airplanes, it’s only logical that they would invest the most in their air traffic controllers.

Over Christmas break in 1968, Ron and I drove to Florida, picked up Dave and his wife, then drove back to Michigan for the holidays. Right after the first of the year, we drove back to Florida, dropped off Dave’s wife, then we drove him to Fort Gordon, Georgia. Then we came back home. That was the first time I got to meet all of my Florida family. I decided then that I would go back and spend more time after I got out of school so I could get to know them.

As the school year wound down, Sam was relentless in his push for me to remember my dream. He went into overdrive trying to convince me I could do it. First though, I had to graduate from high school and it wasn’t looking promising. The last few weeks of school were the beginning of a dawning realisation. I needed a superhuman effort to get my grades up enough to graduate, but I was determined I would do it. I finished with room to spare. I surprised myself both by the effort, and by the result.

There was something that was missed though by me, and by the math department. I couldn’t do an algebra problem to save my soul. Because of that, I—and I’m pretty sure the school as well—thought it was a sign of being mentally deficient. What we missed though is that I have an incredible head for number and letter sequences. I can tell you that after a nearly 40-year career, I never missed not being able to do an algebra problem, but I used those number and letter sequences every minute of every day.

The other thing that none of us understood was my memory. I’ve always been able to retain and recall vast amounts of data. A great part of what made me such a good air traffic controller was my ability to know who I had on frequency, where they were at and what they were doing. Of course, I had the strips there to help me, but it was all there in my head.

In June 1969, I took my first ever commercial airplane ride. I flew from Chicago O’Hare to Tampa, Florida, and spent the month getting to know my Florida family. Going down, I was not at all sure how things would go with my mom’s husband. For the most part, I avoided him and he avoided me. We managed to get through the month without any damage being done. While I was there, I fell in love with a bunch of little girls, as well as a little brother, and decided I would do everything in my power to re-establish a relationship with my mother. At some point, I came to realise that nothing that had happened was my mom’s fault and she was the biggest victim. For the rest of her life, I did everything possible to make sure she knew how much I loved her.

Somewhere along the way, my Florida family decided that I needed a place a little higher off the ground than a normal human being should occupy, so they built a pedestal for me. All these years, I have been afraid of doing anything that would cause me to fall off.

When I got back to Michigan after my Florida trip, I spent more time with Sam and he again pushed me to remember my dream. I was afraid. I was convinced I was not smart enough to do it. Sam made me understand that the worst that could happen was that I might fail, but I could not fail if I did not even try. My friend, Vernon, and I went to the Air Force recruiter’s office to see what they had to say. We both signed on the dotted line. I had a pick-up date in October. Vernon was later, in December. I had a summer to get through so I found a job washing cars at a car dealer in Berrien Springs.

In early October, about 10 days before my date with the Air Force, I was out riding a bicycle down main street in Eau Claire wearing a pair of shorts and a sleeveless vest, when I wiped out. I spent the next three hours or so in the emergency room while they picked gravel out of my hide. I was a mess. My entire left side was all chewed to pieces. The Air Force recruiter was pissed! He found me a new entry date on 1 December.

I rode a bus from Benton Harbour to Indianapolis and was inducted there. After being sworn in, they put me on an airplane to Atlanta, then to San Antonio. We arrived about 3:00 am and were bused to Lackland Air Force Base for basic training.

Becoming

January 1970, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas. Career Day. Every person entering the United States Air Force had a career day. They marched the entire flight over to an old unused barracks building, 120 feet long and 30 feet wide. The walls were covered with pieces of paper that held descriptions of each career field and a 5-digit identification number. Upon entering the building, we were each given a sheet of paper with space for personal identification information, our training unit and up to three career fields in order of our preference. We called it the ‘Dream Sheet’! The Air Force promised that if they couldn’t give you the career field you wanted, they would give you the career field they wanted.

I made a bold decision that day and entered only one career choice on my dream sheet: 27250, Air Traffic Control Operator. I had decided that was what I wanted and if I couldn’t get it, I didn’t care what they gave me. What I didn’t know at the time was that my choice was critically understaffed, so they were not likely to turn down anyone who was foolish enough to actually say they wanted it. The preferential treatment began immediately.

One of the guiding principles of basic training is that it is a 6-week brainwashing session. The idea is to take young men and women and train them to take orders. They want people who will accept what they are told, when they are told, the way they are told. Later on, they will attempt to teach you to think independently as well, but not just yet. In the military, officers give orders; enlisted personnel follow orders. That is the nature of the beast.

Air traffic control is singularly unique in that it turns the normal order upside down. Air traffic controllers in the military are all enlisted persons. Any officers involved are administrative staff. Since 1969, all pilots in the military are officers, except helicopter pilots who are warrant officers, still outranking enlisted persons. Air traffic controllers give orders in the form of control instructions, and pilots follow those orders. It requires a complete rethinking of the normal order.

Keesler Air Force Base, Biloxi, Mississippi. Air Traffic Control School. The first thing they told us that first day of class was to look around, in four months half of you will be gone. They were wrong, it was much worse than that. 75 started, 12 finished. Looking around that first day, seeing the simulators and the volumes and volumes of rules and regulations was both exciting and frightening. I was a painfully shy kid from Podunk, Michigan, with absolutely no confidence. There was no way in the world I could do this! I quickly found out that the requirements were way bigger than I had imagined and that yes, I could do it!

The bible, FAA document 7110-65, Letters of Agreement, MOUs, location identifiers, intersections, aircraft call-signs, aircraft characteristics, drawing maps. The amount of information we were required to learn was staggering and it never ended. Every new facility required new learning. It’s been said that the typical air traffic controller has as much data stuffed in his/her head as you would find in a midsized city phonebook. I think it’s much more than that.

The intensity of the four months at Keesler is beyond my ability to describe. There was never a time when we could relax. Every day, we would look around to see who wasn’t there anymore. The time simply flew by. Suddenly, it was graduation day. Those of us who made it through knew a couple of weeks in advance that we were good to go because we received orders for our next duty assignments. There was no individual competition among us; finishing was the only thing that we cared about, but Podunk finished 1 point off the top in class.

Itazuke Tower, this is Air Force 801. I’m turning on the downwind leg, my prop is overrun. My coolant’s overheated, the gauge says 1-2-1. You’d better get the crash crew out and get them on the run.

Listen Air Force 801, this is Itazuke Tower. I cannot call the crash crew out, this is their coffee hour. You’re not cleared in the pattern now, that is plain to see. So take it once around again, you’re not a VIP.

Itazuke Air Base, Fukuoka, Japan. What an incredible place for a young man to begin a career! I instantly fell in love. From the minute I walked into Itazuke Tower, I knew I had found something special. Most people go to work each day; I went to play.

Itazuke was unique for a couple of reasons. One being that the airport was separated from the main base by several miles and a half hour by bus. The other being that air force controllers handled all ATC for both the military base and the international airport. I’ve seen airports where civilian controllers handle some military traffic but few that go the other way.

It became immediately obvious that we were being treated differently than everyone else. We had a barracks building that housed no one except controllers and was isolated from the others. We were in two-man rooms with a mama-san and a papa-san to look after us. They cleaned our rooms, did our laundry and shined our shoes. We were not required to stand retreat, parades or any other formation. We had no extra duty of any kind. We learned and we worked; that’s what was expected of us.

We had studied the rules and regs, now it was time for practical application. Before we could get to the practical application though, we had to learn about the airport. That meant learning everything: how long was the runway, how much overrun, usable, unusable, where were the turn-off points, how far was the first high-speed, the second? How far apart were the runway lights? What colour were the taxiway lights, the REILs (Runway End Identifier Lights)? How long were the sequence flashing lights (the rabbits), when should they be activated? When do they have to be? Where was the arresting gear located, what kind was it, and how long did it take to fully activate it? What kind of aircraft could use it? Which ones couldn’t? How much clearance was there on the taxiways? Which type of aircraft cannot use certain taxiways? And finally, ‘here’s a blank sheet of paper, draw the airport’.

My training supervisor was a master sergeant named Andy Kyushue. Over time, I came to realise that Andy wasn’t a very good controller, or a very good trainer. In the tower, we had flight progress strips, a piece of paper containing all the pertinent information on each aircraft. They fit into strip holders. At that time, the strip holders were made of lead, about 7 inches long and ¾ inches wide. Andy would begin each training session by collecting a handful of strip holders and set up shop at the back of the tower. If I did something he thought was wrong, he would fling a strip holder at me. Holy shit, that son-of-a-bitch hurt when it pinged off my shoulder, or head!

It was an awakening, a discovery. I had never done anything so easy. The world opened up before my eyes and I felt like I was home. I instinctively knew what to do. Training was hard and challenging, but it was like I was truly alive for the very first time.

There were four of us who had arrived at about the same time. Me from Podunk, Tom from Toledo, Gary from Minnesota and Stanley, a Roman Catholic Polack, from Baston! We didn’t work together because we were all in training so we were assigned to different crews, but we spent as much time together as possible studying. We had a common goal so we helped each other as much as we could. It has always been my contention that what you are looking for in a trainee is for them to reach the point where they are chomping at the bit to get out on their own. That is the point where you begin to get them ready for checkout. I was there. I wanted to be turned loose. Tom and Gary were not far behind.

One morning, when I showed up for work, there was an order for me to report to the chief’s office. My first reaction was, Oh shit, what have I done now? When I got there, I found the chief and all of the training department staff waiting for me. They told me that I was ready for a check-ride and they could do it any time I wanted. I said OK, let’s do it! Then they said they had a favour to ask me.

They said that Stan was struggling and while they believed he could make it, they were concerned that if he saw me check out so much earlier, it might be enough of an emotional setback that he might fail, so would I consider delaying my check-ride until Stan was ready?

My first reaction was, Oh hell no! I worked my ass off for this. I was ready to go! It’s my time! Then, as I thought about it, I felt it wouldn’t hurt me and Stan was my friend, my roommate, so why not. I delayed my check-out for about a month and in the end, it made no difference to anything, and Stan made it. There was nothing more I could have asked for.

I am an air traffic controller! I am not a recruit. I am not a trainee. I am a controller. I got where I wanted to go. About a month later, they told me my name had been submitted into the base’s Airman of the Month competition. Then they told me I had been selected and my name would be submitted for Pacific Region Airman of the Quarter. Then they told me I had been selected for that also and my name would be submitted for Pacific Region Airman of the Year. I never found out what the results of that competition were because before they got to it, I was in Vietnam. We had other things to think about.

Suddenly, the world was different. We were different. We stood a little taller, walked with a bit of a swagger, carried a quiet confidence none of us had before. I believe every newly certified controller learns five times more in the first six months after checkout than in all the training time combined. The reason is simple: for the first time, it’s all on you. All through training, there is someone right beside you and even if you never turn to them for help, you know they are there to bail you out if you get in trouble. Now it’s all up to you! If you get in trouble, you have to find a way out; no one else is going to do it for you.

As a controller, you are never truly alone. Every word spoken, every move made is recorded. If there’s an accident or incident, the tapes are pulled and they will know exactly what happened. Periodically, Quality Assurance (QA) pulls tapes on everyone and critiques their job performance; every year, each controller is scheduled a week in the simulator for refresher training. It’s a never-ending learning environment.

The four of us were all 19 years old and seeing life from a different perspective than ever before. We were finished with training and were assigned to work schedules as part of the staff rather than as an addition to it. We had time on our hands we never had before and a whole new world to explore. Japan!

We had plenty of opportunities to fly, and we took advantage of it whenever possible. The US Navy came in with a P-3 Orion (a sub chaser), and he took us out over the Sea of Japan. The Air Force decided to decommission all of the F-102s in the Pacific Theatre. They brought them into Itazuke where they stripped the avionics out of them before sending the rest to the scrap heap. While it was generally a single-seat fighter, there were some that had two seats, side by side. Whenever a two-seater came in, we would be given the opportunity to go up for a last flight. We all got a ride, and what a ride it was!

They brought in a Jolly Green Giant, a huge helicopter, and we rode around the pattern with the ramp open and a safety strap keeping us from falling out. My favourite though, and I went up as often as possible, was flying around in a Cessna 152. He did photo missions all around the area. He told me that in a different lifetime, he had flown for the Japanese Air Force in an airplane made by Mitsubishi. It must not have been a very good airplane though because they called it the Zero (tongue in cheek)! On his last mission, he was shot down near Okinawa and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp.

We climbed the hills of the Hakata peninsula, wandered the allies of Fukuoka and took a day trip to Nagasaki, where we stood at the shrine for the victims of the second atomic bomb that had exploded there on 9 August 1945. One weekend we went to Sasebo, home of the US 7th fleet, but we didn’t stay. We asked why there were so many young women with painted faces and dressed provocatively. They said the fleet was due in that afternoon and every hooker in the country was in town. It turns out the hookers knew the fleet schedule better than the Navy did. We thought it a good idea to get the hell out of Dodge.

I had a plan. I always have a plan. Near the end of school at Keesler, we got to fill out another dream sheet. This one was to tell the Air Force where we wanted to be stationed after we finished school. We were allowed to put down 7 stateside bases and 3 countries. The Air Force had a policy that if you spent 24 months out of the country, they had to send you back stateside for at least a year before they could send you on another overseas assignment. So, let’s see, if I spend 24 months in Japan then come back for a year, I only have 6 months left, and it’s not enough time to send me to Vietnam. Perfect! All I put on my dream sheet was Japan, England and Germany. I got Japan. The plan got derailed though because in January 1971, they announced they were closing Itazuke and turning the air traffic control over to the Japanese.

Within a few days of the announcement, the Japanese arrived. They held a joint meeting and we were each assigned a Japanese controller to train. We were told we had to have them ready by the end of June. It was a herculean task, but one we embraced with relish. My trainee was Mr Tanaka (Tanaka-san). He was the incoming Tower Chief. He and I hit it off right away. We made a trade-off; I would teach him air traffic control, Itazuke style, and he would show me Japan, as it had been before the American occupation.

Tanaka-San’s home village was in the provinces not too far from Fukuoka. As often as possible, he would take me to the village to visit with his family. It was an incredible part of the growing experience for a young mid-western boy. There were a number of inbred biases that had to be overcome, not without a lot of embarrassment.

In Japan, bodily functions and nudity are part of the normal human experience. There is never a thought of being ashamed of your body. In the village, there was a toilet. There was a trench in the floor and that was used as a urinal. Alongside of it was a series of holes in the ground with places to put your feet as you squatted over it. No walls, no stalls; everyone in the village used the place at the same time. Men, women, children, everyone from 2 to 90.

There was also a bath. It was a tub about the size of a small swimming pool. In the evening, the entire village took a bath at the same time! It was a meeting place. With both of those experiences, there were so many emotions that ran through my head and I was sure I could never do it. By the time I left Japan, I had adapted to the experience as though I had been born into it. It’s amazing how you can adjust when you put those biases away.

It was such an enjoyable winter. We played a lot. We played softball, many of the games with the